Terrence Foushee - On Black women teachers (clip)

Kathryn Wall (KW): Do you feel like the Black women teachers that you’ve mentioned that they were more inclined to have those relationships with your parents than some of your other teachers?

Terrence Foushee: Oh yes. I think part of it – and I could be making this up it’s just a general understanding – to be honest being a Black kid in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools with an incredibly wide achievement gap and dealing with some of the perceptions of Black students in the district, that those Black women didn’t want me to fall into the cracks. And yes, there's a lot that they can do by talking to me and trying to correct my behavior in school. But, in order to take it to the next level, they had to have a relationship with the parents. They had to have a relationship with my mom and dad to make sure that I was being held accountable because, again, as far as integrity is concerned, as a youth when you’re trying to develop integrity, as soon as that conversation happens you might feel bad for a couple of minutes. Maybe even a couple of days. But as long as those teachers are not necessarily in your view, you can easily fall back into the same thing. So consequences and accountability were something that they were making sure that they were teaching me.